Highly Overrated But Still Good

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

I cannot tell you the plot of this movie. I am uncertain what happened, and if I told you a version, you would likely not believe me.Christian Slater plays Bob Maconel, a mousy, picked-on middle aged man. He hallucinates that his goldfish talk to him and bully him. He hallucinates/imagines killing his co-workers.You never know what is his imagination, his hallucination or twists of the screenwriters' mad fantasy.He deals with sadistic bullies for co-workers. One is female, who enjoys coming on to him, then suddenly crying out sexual harassment. I wanted a particularly sticky end for her, but was unsatisfied. Another, the man at the next desk, goes postal.One character is Venessa, a beautiful young woman paralysed from the neck down. She is a self-centred power tripper and tries to force Bob to help her commit suicide. We never know if she can be trusted or if she is just a scheming manipulator who uses Bob as a "spoon" to care for her.You see so many versions of events, you have to put on hold your decision of whether what you just saw was real.The problem with this movie is has no proper protagonist. Bob is just a colourless, mumbling dishrag. It is hard to care one way or the other what happens to him.I thought it odd that no one asked Bob why he had a loaded gun in his desk at the office, with which he shot the worker who went postal. Perhaps in the USA this is common. The only question was why he did not shoot sooner.Venessa explained the clasp on her bra to Bob, her caregiver, who had to bathe, bum wipe and spoon feed for the last few months. Surely by now he would already thoroughly understand female clothing.Much of the plot is Pythonesque. Bizarre things happen and everyone keeps a perfectly straight face and pretends they are ordinary.One amusing scene is Venessa ordering Bob around commanding him not to be "weak" not to let people push him around.The movie just seemed to meander after a shotgun start. I lost interest about half way through.

Although, I say this movie was rather sad, the sad element, which is a major element in this movies plot, is to me completely overshadowed by the beauty the story contains at times. I am a 21 year old male, needless to say, I don't always appreciate a romantic gesture. However, this movie honestly moved me. The relationship depicted in this individuals mind is overwhelmingly deep and wonderful. Sadly, this gentleman the story follows simplistic lifestyle attributes to his complex state of mind, and this is portrayed very well in the movie. I'm not an avid movie critic or anything, just a frequent renter, but I list this in my top 5 all time easily, based on its ability to make you romanticize and wonder. Awesome, Awesome movie.

Christian Slater gives an outstanding, career defining performance in this great little movie. He's Bob, a mix of Milton in Office Space and Michael Douglas in Falling Down, a psychopathic loner who brings a gun to work but can't quite get up the nerve to gun down all the people he hates. In a nice little instance of dark comedy, a fellow psychopathic loner at work also brings a gun to work and begins killing people. At first Bob's somewhat pleased that someone did the dirty work for him, but when his coworker points the gun at a female colleague Bob has hidden affection for, he uses his own gun on the killer, thereby becoming a hero. Nobody ever questions why Bob had a gun in the first place, but after reading some interpretations of the movie, I understood why. Yeah, this is one of those movies you interpret. It's thoughtful and provocative and not at all times literal, but for the most part it's easy enough to follow. For an independent movie He Was a Quiet Man had quite a few moments of CGI, but it's a great example of when such a film-making tool is warranted. We're not talking Transformers or anything, it's the little things... Like when Bob talks to his fish, and we see it talk back. That was a nice little touch - the fish mirrors Bob's wants and desires and subconscious, and by doing that we're given further insight into Bob's clearly demented but fascinating mind, as well as one critical moment of foreshadowing. The supporting cast includes Elisha Cuthbert and the always reliable William H. Macy. Still, this is Slater's show. I've always liked the guy, but he's never really struck me as a serious actor. I'll have to take him more seriously from now on. 8/10

Warning! Major, Major spoilers ahead! I've read a number of the other reviews here and it seems only a handful of people actually figured this movie out. Of course, I may be completely off base as well, but the reviews that make a comparison to Incident at Owl Creek are, I believe, on the right track. Basically, this is a psychotic version of Incident at Owl Creek. Let me try to outline it here - either spoiling it terribly if you haven't seen it or possibly helping you appreciate it a bit more if you have:The first 25 minutes introduce us to Bob(Christian Slater), an office worker who is working up the courage to do the disgruntled postal worker routine. The rest of the movie happens in Bob's imagination in the instant before he does the actual deed. It is important to remember - both during the first 25 minutes and throughout the rest of the movie - that we are seeing Bob's coworkers through his eyes...and Bob is psychotic. I say it's important to remember this because all the people around Bob are the Office Workers from Hell. They are so cartoonish and over the top that if you don't catch on that this is how Bob sees them and not the actual people they probably are, you may be prone to eject this DVD and not give it the chance it deserves. There is the thoroughly nasty immediate supervisor, the mindless and boorish fellow cubicle workers, the office slut, the sleazy boss and the unattainable beauty of a secretary.In the real world, these would all be fairly normal denizens of a fairly normal office. They may have all at one time or another committed some small personal slight or evidenced some character trait that caused terrible damage to Bob's psyche. But remember, Bob is gonzo - and since we're seeing everything from Bob's perspective, their flaws are exponentially magnified and we can't blame him for wanting to exterminate this herd of troglodytes.When Bob's moment of decision comes, we suddenly find ourselves (as we learn later) in an extended fantasy where instead of being the homicidal maniac, Bob becomes the hero as he thwarts another psycho partway through stealing Bob's thunder with a massacre of his own. The rest of the movie relentlessly unveils the self-destructive nature of Bob's twisted mind. Bob warps his virginal heroine into someone neither so virginal nor so heroic as she ought to be, and even though Bob does everything right (of course he does - it's his fantasy after all!) a relationship with her becomes impossible. His imagined promotion to Vice President of Creative Thinking only reveals how pathetic his creative thinking is. His fantasy of the big boss is even worse than he had previously thought. Heroic Bob imagines himself with every advantage he can think of, yet cannot imagine any of it turning out good for him or for anyone else. By the end of the movie we find him back at his moment of decision, gun in hand, about to begin his rampage. It is at this moment he has his one instant of clarity: When he is unable to distinguish whether the woman at the water cooler is his unattainable beauty or the office slut, he finally and mercifully comes to the realization that the only person in the room who is damaged goods is the one holding the pistol. And in his one moment of lucidity, he culls the herd.Now, how do I know this? It all becomes clear - or should - in the last few moments of the movie, when his home is cordoned off and everything in it is as it was at the beginning of the movie; when the TV interviews are only the boilerplate, "He was a quiet man" quotes and say nothing about the Hero Who Turns Homicidal Maniac that would be splashed all over the news had the previous hour been factual rather than fantasy.I would have rated the movie much lower if I hadn't figured out what was going on, but once understood it becomes an interesting study of a psychotic mind. And I would have rated it even higher if they would have added about a 5 to 10 minute epilogue depicting the people around Bob as they actually were, rather than as the monsters Bob showed us they were. I don't think it would have hurt the twist at all - in fact, I think the stark contrast could really have added a jolt for the audience at the end as people tried to figure out how all these rotten characters suddenly became so, well, normal.